SKU proliferation is a significant issue in manufacturing. Manufacturing steel wires that range in diameter from the width of a hair to the width of a finger – and every millimeter in between, combined with different packaging options, customer specifications and multiple machine requirements, result in a product line of 10,000 items. Throw in the fact that raw materials vary for each of those items and the daily challenge faced by Sumiden Wire Products Corporation begins to emerge. The process of taking orders and tracking them was incredibly burdensome and time-consuming.

Sumiden Wire, headquartered in Stockton, California with plants in California and Tennessee, manufactures stainless steel wire materials sold through distribution to spring makers. Their challenge was that the process of taking and tracking orders was incredibly time-consuming due to their semi-manual method for managing an increasingly complex product line and its accompanying raw materials. “We looked for a number of years at different software packages,” Sumiden Wire General Manager, Brian Burr said. “Synchrono seemed the most logical in terms of helping us with our immediate business issue – the instantaneous scheduling and communication of production requirements across the business within real-time capacity constraints.”

With SyncManufacturing demand-driven production planning, scheduling and execution software from Synchrono, Sumiden Wire increased production by 10%, setting an all-time production record. One of Sumiden Wire’s products is manufactured on a particular machine. This machine is a constraint that needs to be utilized 100% in order to ensure maximum throughput. In the past, this constrained machine ran at 65-70% capacity. Since Synchrono gives the production planner complete visibility into the future to see every outstanding order scheduled across that machine on a single screen, it becomes very easy to maximize machine resource utilization, dramatically increase productivity of the constraint, and increase overall plant output. This, in turn, drives dollars to the bottom line without adding machinery, overhead or labor.

When integrated under the Synchrono Demand-Driven Manufacturing Platform, lean and demand-driven initiatives achieve new levels of excellence, transforming businesses by synchronizing people, processes, machines, materials, and data to drive production flow from order inception to delivery.

The award winning Synchrono Demand-Driven Manufacturing Platform offers five system components, including a planning, scheduling, and production management system and ekanban software for real-time inventory replenishment and supply chain collaboration. The Synchrono Platform has a unique a data collection, historian, and automated workflow engine along with an application that generates automatic alerts, escalation and action plans to minimize disruptions. Perhaps most importantly, this technology platform also includes a real-time visual factory information system. Everyone at every level of a manufacturing organization has access to one version of the truth with a dynamic view of what is happening at every stage of the manufacturing process; from order inception through production and delivery.

Synchrono systems allow for the simultaneous exchange of data across systems and resources, the ability to respond to constraints and changes in demand as they occur, and to predict, pre-empt, and prioritize issues. The Platform components may be implemented independently or collectively to enable the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), providing an unprecedented foundation for communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Synchrono delivers a competitive edge. Follow the Demand-Driven Matters blog at www.synchrono.com/blog and follow Synchrono on Twitter at @Synchrono_News.